The same “phenomenon” had occurred immediately after the the Education Department looked into the charge of Asian quota at Harvard in 1988. Although Harvard was cleared, the percentage of Asian population at Harvard increased steadily thereafter to double the percentage today.
Whether you’re for or against using race as a factor in college admissions, the lawsuit has already yielded some results that hopefully we’re all in favor of:
- Some lights have been shined on the opaque admission process at Harvard, and by extension, highly selective colleges elsewhere. Hopefully we all agree that less opacity is always better than more.
- Harvard has revised or tightened up the rules on how to evaluate the "personal quality" of its applicants. The subjectivity of the measure left plenty of room for biases and discrimination.
The 25% figure you listed is from Harvard’s website, which is a profile for admitted students (not attending students), double counts multi-race students, and has unclear methodology for international students. The 17% is from another source that uses different racial definitions. Using inconsistent racial definitions like this gives the comparison little meaning.
The percentage Asian using federal racial definitions are below. These figures are expected to match the CDS, IPEDS, and other federal reporting documents. They show a slight increasing trend during the period from 2012 to 2019, but nothing obviously attributable to the timing of the lawsuit.
Harvard Percent Asian: Entering Fall Class
2019 – N/A*
2018 – 21.0%
2017 – 19.8%
2016 – 21.3%
2015 – 18.9%
2014 – 19.2%
2013 – 18.5%
2012 – 20.3%
*2019 federal reporting has not yet been published, but Harvard’s website suggests an increase over 2018.
I don’t disagree with your assessment of the Harvard case and how it will end but it is just a piece of a larger plan. I read/heard someone postulate that Edward Blum is taking a page out of Charles Hamilton Houston’s playbook for fighting the separate but equal laws that were stuck down with the Brown vs. Board of Education in 1954. Houston devised a multi-pronged attack across many states over 20+ years and died before seeing the landmark Supreme Court decision.
Blum has stronger cases in the pipeline than the Harvard case in my opinion (NC Chapel Hill case in particular), and I believe he is trying to keep this in the news and in the American consciousness because he knows that perceptions can become reality and he is okay with chipping away at race based admissions. If the percentage of Asian Americans increases at Harvard for the upcoming school year, the perception is that his lawsuit was a factor.
Interesting because the word on the street is that elite colleges like Harvard have a soft quota of Asian Americans of around 20%, which definitely matches the info in data10’s post.
Even more than legacy and donor preferences, sports recruitment and preference for a few expensive sports is really an affirmative action for affluent white applicants, according to this article in The Atlantic:
This fact that “perceptions can become reality” to some folks, is dangerous. IMO. It’s also not intellectually sound. IMO.
Lots of factors play in what becomes the class. Lots of info out there (media, some random comment someone makes, etc,) is misleading. You don’t have a full idea of how H does what it does. IMO. Or what it gets to work with. Just some superficials, some tidbits. And many jump to form a “whole” out of that.
There are problems, sure.
There’s a disingenuous aspect to this in that the legal rationale for AA: “ heterogeneous student body promotes a more robust academic environment with a greater depth and breadth of learning,” is not the real reason most people or Harvard support AA.
Whether the Supreme Court takes this specific case or not, they will almost certainly revisit the issue of AA. SFFA is pursuing litigation against UNC-Chapel Hill and UT-Austin. It takes four justices to agree to hear a case and there are almost certainly at least four justices who think Fisher II was wrongly decided.
No doubt that is true. I can think of times that my skin color /the way I looked and dressed (especially as a teenager) were enough to give someone a false perception of both my intellectual capabilities and more often my intentions (He is up to no good). I know the police stopped me enough times growing up because of that dynamic. Just looking at both the political climate of this country and also understanding the power of the media, can you really dismiss what is happening? Because not everyone is on your level my friend. If Harvard’s Asian-American population for the class of 2023 increases by some percentage (let’s say 2 percent) and just happens to be the largest Asian American class in Harvard history, how do you think that is going to be reported? Blum will get the credit for that uptick whether it is true or not (perception becoming reality), even though you are right that there are many factors that affect the composition of a class.
I just saw a new poll out asking about past Supreme Court Decisions on Race in college admissions put out by the Marquette law school. There were a lot of political based questions in the poll besides the race in admissions question, so I am only an attaching a newspaper article on the poll and you can click the Marquette link if you want to see more. The results, (57% Strongly opposed recent SCOTUS decisions, 21% Opposed, 11% Favor, 4% Strongly Favor and 7% Don’t Know), surprised me just as much as a poll earlier in the year that had a similar majority because I am in the minority among my own friend group and family on Race based admissions policies.
The full question wording and the short description was used in the sample of 1,423 respondents “was designed to be representative of the adult population of the United States.” The margin of error is plus or minus 3.6 percentage points.
Past decisions: “How much do you favor or oppose the following recent Supreme Court decisions?”
Race in admissions: “Decided colleges can use race as one factor in deciding which applicants to admit.”
For the Harvard baseline data-set, in 2019,** the admit rate was 2.6% and 2.8% ** for white(non-Hispanic) and Asian applicants, respectively. This is why I wish we had better GCs in high schools. They could tell many of these students not to apply and focus their apps on schools where they have more realistic odds of admission. The baseline dataset includes regular decision applicants who are not athletes, legacies, early decision, dependents of Harvard employees (faculty or staff), or designated on the Dean or Director Interest lists.
Because there is a material difference in admissions rates somewhere between 2.6 or 2.8% and 4.6% (the overall admit rate for last year)?
The admit rates were:
Class of 2018 Admit Rates
Early Action: Non-ALDC = 15.9%, ALDC = 63.7%
Regular Decision: Non-ALDC = 3.1%, ALDC = 18.3%
Class of 2019 Admit Rates
Early Action: Non-ALDC = 12.4%, ALDC = 61.9%
Regular Decision: Non-ALDC = 2.9%, ALDC = 16.1%
This suggests that both applying early and having traditional ALDC hooks can give a noteworthy admission boost. The regression model found a similar magnitude of benefit to applying early when controlling for other variables – roughly 4x greater chance of admission for applying early assuming all other available parts of the application are the same including hook status, stats, reader ratings of applicant, etc.
^So the EA ALDC is ~21x more likely to be admitted than the RD non-ALDC. That’s a stunning ratio, even for those who always assumed hooks were significant.
“ALDC” admit rates aren’t relevant to this statement about the race of applicants, however:
Why would Harvard give REA applicants (Esp. for Non ALDC applicants) a boost? I am quite surprised by these data.
21x higher admit rate, but the specific chance of admission varies
Harvard gets a far higher yield on early admits than regular admits. For example the Harvard internal report at http://samv91khoyt2i553a2t1s05i-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Doc-421-134-February-2013-Report.pdf mentions at 94% yield on REA vs 68% yield on RD, for the class of 2016. The report also shows a notable overall yield increase in the year they returned the early program. There are a variety of reasons why Harvard may care about yield or early vs regular – can plan the class better, prefer to admit students for whom Harvard is first choice over YPSM… rejects, bragging rights (without favoring early they’d probably be #2 among HYPSM… type colleges in yield, not #1), early admits bring in more tuition with smaller portion requiring FA, etc.
Yield protection - REA applicants without hooks are usually the ones who will attend not apply anywhere else if they’re accepted to Harvard. On the other hand, whatever RD applicants write about how much they love Harvard, they may, at the end, attend Yale if they are also accepted to Yale.
Harvard, and other very selective colleges, can afford to accept a much higher percent of non-ALDC REA or ED applicants from because of the concept of “buckets”, meaning, that the college doesn’t want all their incoming students to be too similar, and want representation of many types. So, even among the non-ALDC, they’re not simply taking the “top” 3% of all applicants. They’re selecting applicants from those with the highest stats/achievement. As the data for Harvard show, they can 14% of the top academic decile, 10% of decile #2, etc, rather than 90% of the top half of the top decile.
This means that cutting the applicant pool by 1/2, or even by a lot more, would not make much of a difference as to the academic, and other, quality of the admitted students.As a result Harvard can select 12% of a pool of 6,500, and still get similar applicants as when it selects 3% of the other 35,000 applicants.
Of course, the REA ALDC applicant pool is generally stronger than the RD pool, since the RD pool includes the thousands of applicants who are adding Harvard as reach, because “why not?”. A much higher proportion of REA applicants are students whose GCs, or other knowledgeable adults, have advised that they would have a chance, because of high stats and other achievements.
Yes there is.
Of the students that would have been admitted with a 4.6% admit rate, about 40% of those would have been rejected with a 2.8% admit rate.